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Kaspersky Lab spots new breed of IM worm

Cyber criminals able to wreak havoc on several IM clients simultaneously

Security experts are warning users to be on guard against a new family of
computer worms spreading via a variety of instant messaging (IM) clients.

Kaspersky Lab said it has detected four variants of the IM-Worm.Win32.Zeroll
worm so far.

The malware is unusual because it is multi-lingual and is able to spread over
several IM clients simultaneously, including Yahoo Messenger, Skype, Paltalk
Messenger, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk and the XFire client for
gamers.

The attack appears as a malicious link in an instant message that comes from
an infected machine. Following the link takes the user not to the interesting
picture they were promised, but an infected file and once the malware gains
access to the user’s PC it opens the IM address book and sends itself to all
clients.

IM-Worm.Win32.Zeroll is also able to gain control of a computer without the
user’s knowledge, downloading other malicious programs.

Kaspersky Lab explained that the new breed of IM worm also connects to
different IRC channels depending on the country and the IM clients located on
the computer.

“It appears that the worm’s creators are currently in the early stages of
their criminal activities,” said Dmitry Bestuzhev, Kaspersky Lab’s regional
expert for Latin America.

“They are infecting as many machines as they can in order to get good offers
from other crooks for such things as pay per install, spam and so on.”